• 1977 Cholmondeley Award
• Arvon Foundation International Poetry Competition, England

Poetry

Plays

• Father’s Day (Wellington, 1967)
• George the Mad Ad Man (Wellington, 1967, and Coventry, England, 1969).

Film Acting

• Came a Hot Friday

Memoir

Rereading some of these poems after thirty years re-vealed that they have been bivouacking in the backblocks of memory, ready to return at the slightest prompting. One, "The Happy Army," created a memorable stir when published in the NZ Listener. Critics hostile to modernist twentieth-century poetic developments lambasted it as mere prose transfigured into verse-an odd objection, since Bland writes quite traditional poetry. Indeed, the very essence of Bland's poetry is the way a contemporary voice and a modern concern with the itinerant mind never at home even in its own past are communicated in poetry which has regard for stanza, rhyme in the form of assonance and alliteration, and rhythm which never quite becomes metrical.